This doesn't state the fact that if we stop all emissions now, the temperature will keep rising because there is already too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
IIRC it's falling because the oceans are taking the hit. I might be wrong about what exactly the figure was referring to, though -- might have been not just atmospheric temperature stabilization but other things too.
A lot of people seem to misunderstand the 12 (now 11) year deadline. It's not that suddenly an apocalypse will occur in 2030. It's that after that point, we'll no longer have any realistic hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change that will arrive in the following decades and centuries.
Maybe we need to explain it to people like cancer treatment: if we'd caught it early, maybe chemotherapy alone would have been sufficient. Today, we need invasive surgery, plus chemo, plus radiation therapy, and we also need to hope that untested immunotherapy treatments will work.
If we continue to leave it untreated, then our prognosis is very grim indeed. We won't die immediately, but our cancer will be inoperable.
At the individual level the only option seems to be to brace for impact. Maybe move to colder regions of the globe. Or enjoy the present.
No individual, no civilization, no species are immortal. Our extinction is in the order of things. What is most upsetting, maybe, is it's our own fault and that, in theory, we could have prevented it (just like a smoker who didn't stop smoking while there was still time).
People have a hard enough time caring about humans suffering and dying on the other side of the world. Trying to get them to worry about humans that don't currently exist is a total lost cause.
In my experience, most people don't even care about their own future, i.e. retirement and such, and instead buy cars and other stuff that they can't afford, because short term satisfaction is more compelling than long term one.
So while I agree with you that I care about ny children and grand-children, I don't see this as being a mainstream thought.
It's assuming it's already safe. There is a good chance several armed conflicts of the last decades were influenced by climate chances consequences. Conflicts that also cascaded into other tension rising events, because of immigration, altered business, demography flux, etc.
People have already died because of climate change. So we’re already beyond “safe” climate change.
A good, free, and quick primer is just searching for “uninhabitable earth”. He talks about the real world implications and impacts for various levels of warming.
The death toll in India only, from heat waves only, in recent years is in the thousands. This is an illustration that the "rising ramp" fable would be more realistic if the ramp itself was of varying height.
Some parts of the earth are expected to become more inhabitable with extra 1-2 °C. India is not one of them.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadhttps://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2013/05/mauna-loa...
Maybe we need to explain it to people like cancer treatment: if we'd caught it early, maybe chemotherapy alone would have been sufficient. Today, we need invasive surgery, plus chemo, plus radiation therapy, and we also need to hope that untested immunotherapy treatments will work.
If we continue to leave it untreated, then our prognosis is very grim indeed. We won't die immediately, but our cancer will be inoperable.
At the individual level the only option seems to be to brace for impact. Maybe move to colder regions of the globe. Or enjoy the present.
No individual, no civilization, no species are immortal. Our extinction is in the order of things. What is most upsetting, maybe, is it's our own fault and that, in theory, we could have prevented it (just like a smoker who didn't stop smoking while there was still time).
[0] can't remember where I've heard that
So while I agree with you that I care about ny children and grand-children, I don't see this as being a mainstream thought.
A good, free, and quick primer is just searching for “uninhabitable earth”. He talks about the real world implications and impacts for various levels of warming.
Some parts of the earth are expected to become more inhabitable with extra 1-2 °C. India is not one of them.